On one level, you can’t blame the outdated political reality of Katheryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite on herself and the writer—the re-election of Donald Trump and his rapid, chaotic attempts at the shock doctrine of government systems couldn’t have been confidently predicted when the film was shot in 2024. In this case, the same political tornado that added to One Battle After Another and the closing minutes of Eddington work as a distinct disadvantage to Bigelow’s film, which is now outside of the paradigm.
A House of Dynamite places its anxieties within the Biden-era post-Covid collapse of global order. It opens by telling the audience that the late-Cold War decision to end nuclear proliferation is now over. To borrow an example that the film hints at: Russia doesn’t need to conduct covert operations in Donbass and Crimea anymore, they can just invade Ukraine. Bigelow and writer Noah Oppenheim’s focus is on the failings of the system as built, the shortcomings of a system so intricate, considered, and expensive that everyone has a misguided belief that it can’t fail.
It’s a simple, contradictory metaphor, “a house of dynamite,” and there’s not much to say about it besides the obvious tension between a home and a high explosive. And perhaps that simple idea is what makes Bigelow’s center point—an unforeseen nuclear launch at the United States and the failure of the government to be able to stop it—so easily terrifying. It harkens back to Mark Strong’s “There’s nobody else hidden away on some other floor” speech in Zero Dark Thirty, where the confidence displayed by the massive military apparatus of the US is shown to be surprisingly few people in surprisingly small rooms. Zero Dark Thirty is a film of inconclusion, betraying the ostensible closure to 9/11 that killing bin Laden had, where after the body is identified, Jessica Chastain’s CIA operative who’s dedicated a decade of her life to this assassination walks down a dark hallway not knowing where to go or what it did for her.
A House of Dynamite stretches this uncertainty to the maximum and turns it into the formal experiment of the film’s sprawling showcase of backrooms, command centers, and those that occupy them. The film’s broken up into three chapters, all built around a couple of specific locations and people (cornered by an okay performance from Rebecca Ferguson, a terrifying Tracy Letts, and a paper-thin Jared Harris, respectively) in a national security call as it becomes clear that a nuclear missile is heading for the continental US. In its most relevant focus, information can only exist on screens—the missile’s only seen as tracking data, as are the countermeasures sent after it, everything else is conjecture that people relay to each other about what this means or what they’re to do, yet until it inevitably hits they can’t physically touch the reality that’s about to reshape theirs. The choice to end the film immediately before impact makes this clear, leaving the audience with 10 minutes of credits to sit and think about where the world is going to go once the unthinkable becomes the only thing we know.
That’s all outside the screen, though, like the attacks on the World Trade Center that’re portrayed through audio on a black screen in Zero Dark Thirty. Bigelow makes us think this is where House of Dynamite is going, too, having a brief of people shuffling and buses moving over the dark frame, like a closed loop of world-shattering violence with Zero Dark Thirty or the quietude in Hiroshima before its annihilation that John Adams concludes Doctor Atomic with. But Bigelow instead lights the screen back up, revealing various government officials ferried into Raven Rock to protect the continuity of government in the event that the nation’s surface is destroyed (perhaps there’s an unintended irony, too, that the first major disaster of the 47th president happened in a continuity of government exercise). There’s a misplaced hope in this, or perhaps Sirkian one, that the system might still have a trick up its sleeve even in the event of total catastrophe. I don’t really believe it, and maybe neither does Bigelow.
There’s a larger problem with this kind of liberal-minded analysis of systems failure in that it necessarily presents a nostalgia for a system which never existed outside of The West Wing. In reality, the core the superpower American government that was built by FDR, the New Deal, and WWII has been rotting ever since, with Carter ushering in an era of deregulation that Reagan would expand with jackhammers, turning the original meaning of the wartime phrase “good enough for government work” from plaudit to condemnation. Reagan hit the country with a tactical nuke when he fired the striking air traffic controllers in 1981, simultaneously destroying what was left of the old American labor movement and declaring that the government itself shouldn’t work. Republicans portray that concept as ontological, despite it being born out of an active dysfunction which doesn’t benefit people but the class that controls capital. Since then, the government has been slowly hollowing out for over 40 years before Trump’s second administration realized that nobody would stop them if they picked up whatever wasn’t nailed down (and the nails turned out to be rusty enough, too, that everything could be lifted anyways). The only thing left in that old industrial, heavily subsidized, and totally governmental core was the Department of Defense.
Bigelow’s film posits a terror of “what if the military can’t save us?” through unnerved bureaucrats, coldly murderous generals, and a conflicted president (played by Idris Elba in serviceable if atavistic character). It’s not really a question I’d even think to ask given the completely hostile stance the government has taken against the people in America since January, while all that state apparatuses have done is protect the collective looting of the public sector while the hucksters, pedophiles, dilettantes, and dumbasses that are the face of the administration make enough spectacle that no one can really keep track of all of it or do anything about it even if they could. It’s a nihilistic death rattle by Boomers with an ever-increasing internet-induced neurosis and a younger fascist spawn of right-wingers that reject the concept of information entirely because it doesn’t align with the scared existence they feel they live.
I think the self-induced, psychotic suicide that’s actively happening is much more terrifying than a nuclear missile launched from nowhere, or an asteroid from space, or a sudden Biblical flood, because it’s happening and explainable, yet is still the direction the world is moving towards. Bigelow’s film is one of the dread of decision-making, as if the world has sleepwalked into a trap it made for itself, as opposed to one which people made on purpose.